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Best of frenemies
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Stoppard famously sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the interstices of Hamlet, elevating two supporting characters from Shakespeare’s play into leads. His focus is on how the pair occupy themselves when they are offstage in the parent play, which appears to be by aimless banter and mock-philosophical arguments. But there’s an existential twist: Stoppard’s characters seem to be aware that they are unimportant fictional characters, each casting aspersions on the other’s comparative degree of reality, each claiming that the other doesn’t really exist. Such acts of frenmity grant them what little sense of reality they have in a world which seems, to them, to be absurd and out-of-control.
